The Guggenhein Museum in Bilbao, Spain, recently refurbished its lighting system with solutions provided by Austrian lighting company Zumtobel.

The spectacular building of the museum is characterized with slanting walls, intersecting building elements and sloping or rising ceilings, marking a challenge for lighting design. To meet the museum’s technical and financial requirements, Zumtobel developed a custom-made product that can be used as a wallwasher, spotlight, very narrow spotlight and projector.

(Image: Zumtobel)

The most important lighting task in the museum is the perfect highlighting of the essence or shape of an exhibit. The performance of Zumtobel’s wallwasher spotlight offered the mix of finely accented and large-scale lighting, together with uniform light distribution throughout combined with color rendering (Ra > 96) in the exhibition areas which the ceilings are up to 12 meters high. In addition, the UV- and IR-free lights protect the exhibits and deliver three color temperatures, 3000 K, 3500 K and 4000 K, to perfectly showcase the artworks. Moreover, a special filter can be used to create diffuse light and oval light distribution.

(Image: Zumtobel)

Zumtobel provided customized lighting solutions including narrow spotlights to offer precise and sharply contoured lighting. Its PROJECTOR spotlight also comes with a special zoom with four different lenses (14, 25, 35 and 50 degrees) for a wider range of focus. These lighting solutions bring the exhibits to the fore – enhanced by perfect lighting and the museum architecture.

Thanks to innovative LED technology, the special lighting solution also enables a significant reduction in energy consumption compared with the previous museum lighting, which was a requirement by the museum. Bluetooth makes maintaining the lighting solution particularly easy. Zumtobel has installed more than 1000 special luminaires at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.